Rise Above Your Station: An Evening With the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle

Housing Works is a non-profit Soho bookstore that fights AIDS and homelessness, where Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle is about to read from his forthcoming debut novel, Wolf in White Van. Darnielle isn’t the first wordy musician with literary pretensions—there’s Colin Meloy and David Byrne and Patti Smith, to name a few—but a novel is the next logical step for someone who’s filled 14 studio albums, 23 EPs, and four compilations with relatable characters, dramatic situations, and recognizably literary themes like spirituality, drug addiction, and more.

Besides, the novel would be intriguing even if it were coming from an unknown. Wolf in White Van is the story of Sean Phillips, who’s been "isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen" which has led him to create Trace Italian, a text-based role-playing game played through the mail (think Dungeons & Dragons). His story is intertwined with Lance and Carrie, high school students from Florida and players of Trace Italian whose gameplay begins to have real life repercussions, drawing Sean back into the world he’s neglected for so long.

Darnielle is a writer with only one work of published fiction—a novella based on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality from the 33 ⅓ series—who’s being feted with the headlining spot at Tumblr-sponsored reading. Not every first-time novelist would be so lucky, but Darnielle’s work with the Mountain Goats has won him the devotion of thousands—which isn’t a bad place to start in a publishing industry that’s somewhere between "not great" and "completely, beautifully fucked" depending on who you talk to.

Take Alexis, a girl I meet who works in Brooklyn but lives in New Jersey. She’s standing at the front of the stage, right in the middle, and is wearing a Mountain Goats shirt. When it’s announced that a raffle will give away five Wolf in White Van shirts, two galleys, and a signed poster from Darnielle’s last appearance at Housing Works, she begins ardently clapping after "shirt." A minute later, she leaves and returns to her friends holding no less than 40 tickets, coiled around her arm like a lasso.

There’s Liz, who lives in Connecticut but came to NYC to catch this and a midnight screening of The Room, and Jessica, who thinks she saw every Mountain Goats show when she lived in Chicago for six years and can’t pick a favorite song when I ask her, only the one she’s been listening to most these days ("Up the Wolves"). Darnielle has super fans, and in preparation, the usual chairs at Housing Works have been done away with, the book carts shoved all the way to the wall, so that the quickly at-capacity crowd can circulate without crushing each other.

This has everything to do with the emotionally affirming nature of the Mountain Goats’ music, into which Darnielle has channeled the turmoil of his younger years. Look at a song like "Broom People", from 2005’s The Sunset Tree, narrated from the perspective of a troubled teenager who’s bullied at high school and at home before finally finding salvation in the arms of another person. It describes a hushed interior life almost too painful to speak out loud, then suddenly soars to a tear-producing high. It’s the sound of losing and finding yourself, rendered with novelistic detail and searing catharsis, the type of song that makes fans think, "Me too."

Additionally, Darnielle has always carried himself as a charming, thoughtful personality. In this modern age, he’s become a reliably engaging social media presence, delivering absurdist humor and topical observations on his Twitter and Tumblr while further drawing fans into his world. There’s a Tumblr dedicated to collecting his best moments, and were someone not familiar with the Mountain Goats there’s a solid chance they could see his timeline, think "Wow, what a funny and intelligent person" and only later realize, "Wait, and he makes music?"

Which means there are diehards who cheer wildly when the Housing Works host asks who’s here for the first time, casual fans who might know Darnielle and the Mountain Goats a little bit but not too much, and of course, the typically cultured New Yorkers who are here because it’s Thursday, duh. As one woman tells me, while double fisting a glass of white wine and a cup of coffee, "We’re Tumblr people, but also people who like readings and people who like the Mountain Goats." When the first speaker, Catherine Lacey, gets up on stage, she hesitates after looking at the crowd and says, "Literary readings do not look like these, if you go to these." She tells a tense story about a newly married couple who are beginning to hate each other on their honeymoon that could fit right into Tallahassee.

Lacey is followed by Rainbow Rowell, a popular YA novelist who prefaces her passage by talking a little bit about Darnielle. "I could not say I wrote this book because of the Mountain Goats," she says, "but I would not have written it without them." Specifically, it was The Sunset Tree, which is largely regarded as the band’s most personal album, that drew her in. "I felt like those songs were coming from inside of me, getting louder and louder," she says. "I cried over those songs. That album unlocked me, and continued to unlock me." As if proof, she quotes two lines from "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?"—"Alone in my room, I am the last of a lost civilization/ And I vanish into the dark and rise above my station"—and tears up while doing so.

The stage has been set for Darnielle, who gets up to abundant applause. He’s dressed in a recognizably casual outfit, one he’s played any number of Mountain Goats shows in—a grey jacket, a blue dress shirt unbuttoned at the top, heavily cuffed jeans, and black dress shoes. His introduction is brief and banterless, focusing on how he wanted to pick a passage that "digs a little deeper" rather than something that would get an easy laugh. Before reading, he takes his glasses off.

Darnielle’s reading voice is recognizably nasal, but without the need to rise above his band there’s an earthier, nearly stentorian tone in his delivery. This passage is heavy and jokeless, and nearly impossible for the crowd to audibly approve of. In it, Sean describes the car crash that his father has instructed him to lie about being in—the true nature of his debilitating injury is apparently left secret until the end of the book. Then, he reveals that his presence is unwanted at his grandmother’s funeral—that his father breaks down in saying so, and that he must accept the turn of events with the grace of someone who is relearning to live their life without going insane.

The injury has left Sean impossibly disfigured, and he describes looking up to Conan the Barbarian, the ripped warrior whose fantastic adventures surely played a role in Darnielle’s own adolescence. "He was my model," Sean says, and when he closes his eyes—here, Darnielle does the same while reading and nearly shivers—he can picture himself as Conan, his body no longer limp, his hair no longer scabrous and clumped. The short passage is filled with aphorisms that, with a little musical tweaking, could pass for whispered anthems in Mountain Goats songs: "I have a theory that the less you say when someone dies, the better"; "Some things you practice a few times, but it doesn’t make it any easier". In just a few minutes, Darnielle has described complicated family dynamics, escapist fantasies, and in the most effortless part, a second-person narration of a sequence in Trace Italian, the game that Sean’s invented. It’s compelling, and leaves little doubt that Wolf in White Van is the work of a real writer, not a well-connected blog star. When he’s done, he disappears from the stage—if he stays for long to mingle with his fans, I don’t see it.

After the reading, I catch up with Alexis—the ardent clapper with the Mountain Goats shirt and the ticket lasso. When I ask her why she’s such a fan, her answer gives me goosebumps. "There’s so many songs and so much to enjoy," she says, "but I’m a two-time cancer survivor, and blasting ‘This Year’ got me through it." This is what Rowell was talking about, how Darnielle’s songs have a way of speaking from inside you in times of need. When the raffle begins, Alexis waits anxiously to see if she’s won. Every ticket is called without recognition, to her disappointment… but the final prize, a galley of the novel, is won by her friend. Like the pleasure of his music, I can only assume they’ll share it.